How to Reinvent Your Life in 2026

0:00 Back in June 2023, I published an episode of this show that described a lifestyle design tool that I called the deep life stack. Now, this was my best attempt at describing a general process for taking a life that might feel aimless or disappointing or shallow and transforming it into something more remarkable, what I would refer to as a life lived on purpose. Now, why do I care about this topic? Well, in part it was because I write a lot about the dangers of digital distractions and I came to realize that really the most effective strategy for putting down your screens is to make your analog life more interesting than your digital. So

0:45 anyways, I put out that episode. People seem to really like it. Soon after I put out that episode in 2023, I started working on a book completely dedicated to this idea of the deep life. A few months into that project, when I was just doing my background thinking and research, I realized that my deep life stat concept needed some work. So, in November of 2023, I put out a new episode in which I explained this predicament. Earlier this year, I introduced a stepbystep plan for cultivating a deep life. I called it the deep life stack. Since then, I have been gathering extensive feedback from you, my listeners and viewers. I have also been extensively experimenting with this new construction in my own life and I

1:30 have a major revision. It's what we can call the deep life stack 2.0. My new and improved evidence-based approach for how to cultivate a deep life. What you can use as your driving force to get away from a world lost in digital distractions and shallow. So here's the plan. Let me just quickly remotivate. I'll start by quickly remotivating why this approach of life-changing is important. Second, I'll review what didn't work about the original Deep Life Stack. So, what the feedback told me wasn't quite working. And then we'll get into the new Deep Life Stack 2.0. I'll give you your step-by-step instructions for how in a short period of time to make drastic changes to the depth

2:16 experienced in your own day-to-day existence. Now, this episode was even more popular, and this brings us to today. So, what has happened since that November 2023 episode? Well, I finally finished that book. It took me two and a half years, but just a few months ago, we locked in the manuscript for my deep life book, which is coming out in March, which means I have two and a half years since I last talked about the deep life stack, doing nothing but thinking about how best to cultivate a deep life. And so, I think we know what this means. It's time to revisit that tool once again and announce the version three of my deep life stack. That's exactly what we're going to do. Um, I'll start by briefly previewing version one, the issues with that, version two, the

3:02 issues with that, and version three. Spoiler alert, the name of the tool is going to change today. So stay tuned for that. So if you've been thinking recently about making major changes to your life, it's the fall. this is the time I think is good to think about doing that then you're going to like what I have in this episode. All right, so let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. All right, so I want to [music] start with the original deep life stack version 1.0. I'll walk you through it and explain what I had in mind and then I'll explain what the issue was. So, we'll get the two and then we'll get to my new idea. All right. So, I'm going to actually uh God help us all Jesse, but

3:49 I'm going to draw this on the screen. Um, so for those who are watching, you can see this. All right. So, the deep life stack was the first one was a collection of five layers that stacked on top of each other. All right. So, the first layer and I'll I'll write this on here with my beautiful handwriting. U So, we have this first layer of discipline. Above it was values. Let me write that on here. Above that was calm. I actually had forgotten exactly what was on this stack from so long ago, Jesse. So, it was interesting to go back. And above that was plan. Um, I'm going to make each of these within a nice box because we saw this as a stack. All right. So, at the bottom of the stack, we had discipline. On top of

4:36 that was values. On top of that was calm. And on top of that was plan. And so the basic idea was uh up here where it says plan, that's the way we had been talking about the deep life up to that point. This is where you had a description of your ideal lifestyle broken into buckets to make sure that you're capturing a a a totality a vision of your whole lifestyle. U this is my concept of lifestylecentric planning which had been in the show since its first episodes in 2020. This idea that one radical change is not going to fix everything. If you want a better life, you have to fix your lifestyle, all the aspects of your life to on a regular basis yield you better results as opposed to hoping one change fixes. Um, that's all we had been talking about before the deep life stack came along.

5:21 And that was all in this new in the deep life stack was all captured at the top and plan. The big insight of the stack is, oh, there's a lot of other work that's necessary before you're going to succeed in figuring out what should go into your plan or actually succeed in executing it. And so the way I talked about it in June of 2023 is let's start by actually just getting your discipline higher. Make you into someone who feels like you're capable of doing hard things that are optional. Then I said, let's get your value straight because how are you going to really figure out what you want in your life if you don't know what you care about? Calm was my term I used to capture everything you might think about as like time management or organization, right? How do you actually get control of your schedule and obligations? because if you can't keep your arms around all you have to do, then you're not going to get things done you want to. And then the plan was on top of it. All right, so that was the

6:06 idea of the um original deep life stack is that hey, we forgot all of this part, but that is a key part when you actually want to change your life. Um so that's deep stack version 1.0. All right, so what was the problem? What was the problem with that way of thinking about constructing your life? Well, as the summer went on, I realized, oh, there's two separate things here, there's this becoming more capable piece, and that's actually really more complicated than I was giving it credit. And then the planning is more complicated than just like, okay, now figure out your life. And so, so as as I began to think more about it, I split the stack into two, right? So I

6:52 was saying, all right, let's have a separate stack for capability versus a separate stack for how you actually then like make the transformations once you're ready. All right, this one's complicated, but let's go back to the screen here and I'll show you what I had in mind. All right, so for this for this next one, for version 2.0, this is where things got complicated. Um over here we had the first stack which I called phase one stack. The one you would navigate first. Discipline at the bottom. Then I had control. I'll explain each of these in a second. On top of that I had craft and on top of that I had simplification. Simplification.

7:38 Right. So this was uh stack one. And let me put boxes around all this. All right. I said you start here stage one you navigate this stack to get capable get ready for actually making major uh changes in your life. All right so I said you want to start there. Um discipline you start with discipline like we said before. This is where just you get used to the idea of doing hard things that are optional. And then control took the place what I used to call calm. I was like now you want to get control of your obligations and time. And then I was like maybe I really want to integrate in here my thoughts about career capital deep work. Like how do you actually work in a way that's going to be effective? How do you build useful things with your mind? Right? That this would be useful just to have that tool in your toolbox before you try to make big transformations. And then I had the simplification piece on here, simplifying your life so you don't have

8:23 too much going on. So you have breathing room in your schedule and you have reserves in your energy to actually pursue changes. And so I call that whole thing uh stage one. And you would work your way through that stack. And when you're done with that, you would move over to a second stack. And this is the stack that was dedicated to actually uh transforming your life. And this got more complicated. I'm going to write the things here and then we'll go through them each. I had values at the bottom. Then service. And again, this is from November 2023. Then I had a word that's not going to fit. Look at that. I'm gonna transformation. Geez. So, we could already see the problem I had with this is these words were too big. You're really good at

9:09 navigating the notability though. >> Well, I teach with it. All right. Transformation and then legacy. All right. So, let's go through those. Right. So, we had and this is man things got complicated. All right. Values was at the bottom of the second stack. Man, it's getting complicated. Jesse, now you're going to see the problem why I'm simplifying. I'm going to have 3.0. On the second stack, the first layer was values, right? So figure out first and foremost when you're trying to transform your life um what actually matters to you. Then introduce service. I was on a kick then like that you have to be servicing other people in any notion of a deep life. Transformation is where you would actually start making changes to your life to move it closer to an ideal lifestyle. And then legacy was okay.

9:54 After you're able to do that, you choose one area or one one or two places to really make a move to do something remarkable, something that people are going to remember you by. Because I felt like that would be that's a common piece when you when you hear stories about lives that are deep is like and they did this thing that was like really remarkable. Can you believe this person did it? All right. So this was the deep life stack 2.0. You had to first navigate this capability stack that had a lot of pieces and then you could navigate this transformation stack which itself had a lot of pieces and somehow this would all come together and that's really what you needed to create a deep life. All right. So the problem with that clearly this is someone who's in the early stages of working on a book where all I have all of these ideas on brainstorming that seem relevant to the task at hand of cultivating a deep life and I put them all into this vision.

10:44 The problem is uh it's too complicated. That's problem number one, right? It's too complicated. Two different stacks you have to execute sequentially each of which has four different items in it. This is getting too cute, right? this is getting too like in the weeds. U not acknowledging the variety that we might have of different people, you know, their experience and what they're trying to do. It felt like I was getting too in the weeds. And if we bring this back up again, Jesse, I'll show you a couple other problems. I was mixing in specificity with technique. And in general, my approach to the deep life and the the whole idea of the book I have coming out is I'm not going to tell you what should be in your life to make it deep. I don't know that. I'm going to give you a method for how do people successfully transform their lives. Well, in the deep lifestack 2.0, I mix those up. Like look at this service.

11:31 That's not a general component, a general strategy to to successfully transform your life. It's a specific thing I'm saying you should have in your life to be deep. So, I was violating that process versus content barrier that I actually thought was important for talking about it legacy. I was on a kick back then that said, "Hey, deep live should have some remarkable piece to it. Something you do that like really reflected your values in a way that people would literally remark about." But that's not necessarily necessary. Came across many examples of deep lives. You don't need that, right? So that was getting again I think it was getting too specific. Less process um more content which I thought was an issue. And same thing over on the capability uh you know career capital deep work maybe maybe that's relevant maybe it's

12:16 not you know I so it just it felt like it was too complicated and I was mixing too much content with process we're going to take a quick break from our discussion of the deep life stack to hear from some of the sponsors to makes this show possible but stay tuned because after this break I will be revealing my new thinking on how to cultivate a deep life. But first, let's talk about our friends at Surf Shark. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you know I talk a lot about intentionality. Not just in how you work, but in how you interact with your technology. Every time you log online, browse a site, click a link, or make a quick search, you're leaving behind a massive digital footprint. The attention economy giants and data brokers are tracking that activity to build a

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14:33 surfark.com/deepquests or use code deep questions. I also want to talk about our friends at Quo. Um, Jesse, you know, I'm into Halloween decorations, but I got to say a lot of the people and companies you get involved with or try to contract contact when finding out about things like animatronics or actuators, which I'm trying to buy right now. These are often smaller companies, right? These are sort of specialized startups and it can be difficult sometimes to actually get a hold of people. This is an issue if your phone setup is messy. people have your customers have a hard time getting in touch with you. This is where Quo enters the scene. Quo is the modern business phone system that

15:20 is built to ensure that no call, text, or lead falls through the cracks. It gives your entire team a unified inbox, dedicated numbers, and smart routing so everyone stays on the same page whether you're at your desk or on the go. Quo integrates with the tools your team already uses like HubSpot, Zapier Claude, and more, helping you save time, stay organized, and spend less time chasing information between systems. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Now you can try Quo for free. Plus, get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/deep. That's quo.comdeep. All right, let's get back to our discussion. All right. So now two and a half years

16:07 later, can we do better? So how is how do I think about the deep life stack uh today after I've I've finished a whole book about it. All right. So here's how my thinking has evolved. I have moved away from a stack. A disappointment to all my computer science friends who deal with uh stack data structures. And I imagine if we're going to have a a core diagram of a tool for transforming your life, I imagine it now more like a map that you navigate. So we're going from the deep life stack to a deep life map. All right. And this metaphor is going to make sense in a second. Um, so what is on this map? There's three different

16:53 territories, right? This is the way I think about it. Like so over here we'll have the territory related to capability. Over here we'll have a territory related to values. And over here up top I'm going to have a territory related to vision. I'll kind of draw these. These are like these are territories. Okay. These are three different territories that are relevant to transforming your life into something deep. The capability territory is where you get things like disciplines. It's where you get things like time management. It's where you get things like contemplation. How do you actually

17:40 control your mind, focus on things, uh put your mind's eye on targets that you have chosen, whether they're internal or external. Uh the becoming a more capable human being. That is sort of a a theme through a lot of my thinking about the deep life. I see that now as like its own territory. There's a separate territory for values where you figure out what's important to you and have rituals in your life to reinforce that. Right? So, this is where you're making sure that you understand what matters to you and why. And vision is what captures all the the uh the specific description of what your ideal lifestyle is plus your plan for how to move closer to it. Now, if we go back to this diagram here for a second, Jesse, the way I see it is capability helps you with your vision. The more capable you are, the more uh successful you'll be implementing your vision.

18:26 Values also feeds in to your vision. The better you understand your values, the more they'll be reflecting what you decide to put into um your vision as well. And the reason why I call this a map is what I came to understand is that you're going to wander through these territories and depending on where you are, that journey might look a little bit different. Some people really don't have their act together. So any sort of attempt to make major changes to their life is going to fizzle. So really they're going to start in this capability territory and they're going to spend maybe a lot of time in there. I mean I think for some people this could be a year plus of just sort of getting your act together before maybe then they'll wander over in the vision. Other people they're like I don't know what I'm all about. I got my act together. I'm doing really well. I'm organized. You know I get after it but I

19:11 don't know why I'm you know whatever. I'm in private equity making a lot of money and don't know what to do with it. Right? So, you're like, I got to really get my values together. And maybe that's going to mean some sort of philosophical system or reintegrating religion into your life. And that could be a territory you're going to journey in for a while. Um, for other people, that's all in place. They're like, great, let me just get to this vision territory where I need to spend some time and figure out, so what do I want my life to look at and what are my concrete practices and projects for getting closer to that? Right? The key thing is there's a lot of moving back and forth. This the other thing I came to understand is maybe you spend some time here. You go up here. You're in this land for a while. You're making some changes. It feels a little bit disconnected. So you wander down here. Spend some more time with my values. Updates this vision. It's kind of going fine. Then you're as your vision gets more ambitious, you're hitting up against some walls. Now you go and spend some more time back in

19:56 capability. Then you come back to it. It's a it's a ciruitous journey, right? That you might move back and forth between these things. And the amount of time you spend in each of these things will depend on your particular circumstances. And I don't have necessarily this sort of like very clear stack in each of these either. I have like a collection of related topics for some of these. And then um you can decide which of those are important or not. So this is probably how this is how I would think about the deep life today. Now I'll tell you the book I I wrote that's coming out in March actually has an incredibly detailed kind of vision game plan for how to navigate these territories in like a very systematic way. But at this point, I think the the the main idea is these are the components that go into a deep life. And almost always where you have problems where someone wants something more, they're on the screen all day because

20:42 their life outside their screen is lacking and they want that life outside their stream to be better. Almost always when you find someone who wants something more, they're lacking some of these territories on their conceptual map, right? And we see this all the time. I I often see people who are not doing the vision thing right. That's probably the biggest issue people have. Instead of having a a tested vision of an ideal lifestyle they're systematically moving towards, they subscribe to the idea of if I just make one big enough impressive attention-catching enough change, everything will be better. So like that's an off that's often a trap people have. If I could just get this job, if I could just win this award, if I could just um be famous, right? Like just if I could just do this one thing that's really big, if I could move to the woods, everything will fall in place.

21:27 So, they're lacking the vision area. Like, no, no, no. You need to understand your whole lifestyle because your day-to-day subjective state is determined by all the aspects of your lifestyle, not the consequence of one major change. Some people are really good at the vision thing, but they're, you know, the capability thing is lacking. And it's like, I don't know. I'm I'm running around. I procrastinate. I'm too I I don't manage my obligations and time well. I never have time to get anything done. I'm too busy. I'm not busy at all, but I can't get off the couch. I'm just playing video games, right? And so like when you miss out this like nothing really happens and then this you know we don't talk about values as much but we should having some sort of uh tested core either transcended or intellectually rigorous that you use to to to understand what what's important to you and how you want to direct your life makes everything else much easier. It gives you the

22:13 motivation for it and helps you aim towards things and around traps. So usually where there's an issue it's they're missing one of these areas not that they don't have the exact detailed list for what to do in each of these areas. So I think the deep life map is a better way of thinking about shifting towards a deep life than these increasingly complicated deep life stacks. And the a key thing about this and this is a key thing in the way I think about this in my book is that none of this is prescriptive of content. None of this is telling you this is what should be in your life. You need to make sure that you have a mix of this, this and this. Your work should be like this. Your relationships should be like this. This should be like your spiritual life. That's for you to discover. The key is okay, how do you discover it and how do you actually make actions and I think something like this map gives us a better way of thinking about how you

22:59 actually move uh towards a deeper life. So we went from deep life stack Jesse to deep life map. >> I like it. Is that what your book says? Is it the Is that what it's called in the book or you can't say? >> Um I don't use the map metaphor in the book. I'm like, if if we're going to have like the stack metaphor, if we're have these visual metaphors, I thought the map was better here. The way the book I mean, I could talk about the outline of the book. I'm whatever. It's my book. [laughter] Um I don't know who's going to stop me. Chapter 1 through four is um mainly about animatronic design at Disney. But that's just sort of like an amuse to sort of get you ready for the discussion that follows. Uh and then I have uh two chapters on the the pitching preparation of the Washington Nationals. So, we kind

23:46 of get into that, but there's then chapter eight is about how to have a deep life. So, yeah, I have it all in the book. No, no. Okay. So, the actual outline of the book, and I'll tell you the key to me for this book is um I really don't like when you the the accusation or the reality of picking up a book where you're like, "Okay, there's like a blog post here and then then you're just patting it with like case studies and this and that." You're like, "I could have gotten this in something short." I was like, "No, no. I want to write a book where it's sequential. Here's the first thing to work on. Here's the next thing you do. Here's the third thing. Each chapter is essentially explaining like the next thing you need to do. So, it's no there's no filler there. Like, okay, now I need step three and chapter three will give me step three, right? So, I don't want there to be any filler. I wanted everything to be giving you like new information that's part of actually implementing this

24:32 vision. And the way it goes now is I open the book um I believe the first chapter is is explaining this idea of lifestylecentric planning, which is at the core of how I think about transforming your life. But we've been talking this way since, you know, 2020 and about how this sort of phase shift model of like one major change will fix everything, why that doesn't work and why fixing the lifestyle and working backwards from that is what's going to work. So, we sort of set the stage. Um, then I get really detailed about how do you figure out what you're actually looking for in your life, right? That would go into the vision part of the map here, but I get into a uh I call it actionbased insight. And I actually get into like specifically here's the notebook you have. Here's what you're writing down. Here's what you're going to go do. Like you're going to build out insight systematically about what

25:17 actually matters to you in your life. Then in the next chapter, we transform that into a lifestyle vision, ideal lifestyle vision. What goes into it? What format? What are the what what's what do we mean by buckets? What do you actually have in it? Like what how do you build a a an actual useful co comprehensive ideal lifestyle vision? Then we get into the the next chapter is okay. Now that you have that vision, how do you construct your plan for how you're going to move your life closer to it? That's like where we really get into the weeds of the fun stuff where you figure out like actual decisions to make and strategies to follow. Um what changes should I do or not? How do I assess some different types of changes to think about? And so it's then how do you make that plan? So like those first four chapters are just bringing you through step by step to where you're finally going to end up with a insight

26:04 driven vision of your ideal lifestyle with a concrete plan for starting to make progress towards it. That's when I then step back and explore the other two territories of this map. So with that all established because I want to just get right into it. Like here's the core idea. Let's build this thing out. And like that's kind of the core of the book. Then comes capability. I was like, "Okay, now that we know all that, I'm going to go over a crash course for becoming a more capable human being. If you're already super capable, maybe you only need parts of this. If you're a mess, spend time because I break it into three different things to look at and get very concrete like here's here's how to a crash course. I want you in a few months to be a capable human being. And then after that is the what about God chapter, the values chapter, the values region like okay, but what about values? Let's add that. Okay, this is why this

26:50 would be very important. Let's now update the way that we're keeping track of this to explicitly integrate values and here's how to think about and why it's important. So it's like the the idea here's here's my approach versus other approaches one two three three chapters of just implementing it like let's get right into it and you end up with a plan and a vision and then stepping back and saying okay if you need the brush up on just being organized and disciplined and being able to control your mind Cal Newport in the weeds just advice advice advice advice what about values let's put that at the very end because I don't want to distract you with that but you're this is at the end you're going to want to integrate this in to really make this full. So that's the current that's the structure. >> When you when you went on your last book tour with slow productivity, it always

27:36 came back to the three, you know, core fundamentals of slow productivity. Is it going to be something similar for this? >> I guess I just get there naturally. It's a good observation. Yeah. That it's like vision. How do you figure out what you want and build a plan to get there? And that's like three chapters of the book. Capability, that's one chapter, but it's really kind of like three chapters. It's one chapter that's broken into three different things. It's, you know, um, controlling your time, discipline, and and controlling your mind. Um, and then values is its own chapter. So, yeah, that this deep life map has three major territories. >> Cuz when you were going through the tour, a lot of questions you would get, I was like, I wonder how I was going to answer it. But that always came back to the three things. And I was like, oh, wow. Okay. >> Well, yeah, it always like, okay, that falls into this territory. Let's talk about that territory. Yeah. So, that's probably the way I'm going to

28:22 >> God, I got to start thinking about touring again. I was just like amazed how it like I mean obviously you're a professor but like everything came back so it was like structured. >> Yeah, I know. But I've been doing these things for a while. >> I know. [laughter] >> Coming up on book number nine. Been doing these things for a while. Um I assume >> when you read an unstructured book, you must be like get this out of my hands. >> I'm like what is going on here? [laughter] A stream of conscious nonsense. Yeah. You know, if I if I read like Ginsburg, if I read, you know, how or something like that, my head explodes like what's the stream of conscious nonsense? Structure your arguments, Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I want numbered subsections. Come on, what are you doing here? I know I do think about it. This is probably what I'll do here, right? Is like when I think about like, all right,

29:08 core idea is lifestylecentric planning versus this phase shift model. Core idea number one. Um, core idea number two, you need a deep life if you to make all the other stuff I talk about make sense. Like those will probably be like two core ideas, right? Like why am I writing about the deep life? Because all the other stuff, technology criticism that I do, none of it's going to work or it all works much better if you can also make an analog life that's so interesting that you don't want to look at Tik Tok all day, right? Idea number two, lifestylecentric planning versus the phase shift is the way to do it. All right, so then how do we execute that? I think yeah, all come back to these three things. You have to be capable human. You need some sort of foundation of values and visioning is a com it's an art. Like the book is like it's not obvious how to build a vision of your lifestyle and a plan to get there. Like we always just sort of skip that part.

29:54 Like hey here's the things um I don't know. I think so many of these books are like here are the five things you need in your life and I'm going to talk about scientific studies for each and studies show that if you have like six good friends versus three that you'll get 1.7 extra years on your average longevity. And uh you know social psych research on motivational centers show that if your work has these aspects then you're going to enjoy it more than that. So make sure that your work has this or that. And no one ever gets into the mechanics of like but how do you figure out what you want? What does that mean? What what's like a good description of what you want? I wrote a whole book that said don't just follow your passions bad idea. So what what should you be aiming for? What is a lifestyle? What goes into that? Why is that better than just making like one-off changes? Why why are you going to end up you know happier that way? How do you actually describe how do you make

30:40 a plan? Like in my planning section of this book, it's a very mechanical book. Like I'm very I'm being very adicy in this like on purpose and like my planning section in this book that's going to be coming out. I mean I'm really getting into all right you have these practices and projects like how does this integrate into your like daily planning your weekly planning like how do you actually track and make sure that you're you're putting aside and making progress on these things are going to move you closer to your vision. That part's often left out. It's just a sort of you know a lot of these books are just let's get you hyped up about the idea of a better life. Um, but I also just squeeze so many examples in here. >> There's so many stories, so many examples. Like, you're never gonna It's a very structured book. It's numbered sections, but you're never far from because when I think about The Deep Life, I see everything through the lens of examples. And sometimes it's famous people. Most of it's people you've never

31:26 heard of. Um, that's how I understand these things. It's like, so what is it about this person who did this? Oh, this is the principle at play. Well, what about this? This example always makes me think about that. Um, it's a great collection of examples, too, because they're I don't know. I have a weird collection of things I've pulled from over the last half decade thinking about this. Like characters you haven't heard about or sides of people that you have heard about that you've never heard that aspect of their stories. There's original interviews in there with people that you might have known of, but details that no one's ever heard before about their life or their trajectory. Um, so the whole thing is trying to keep it uh keep it pretty, you know, grounded. >> Mhm. but still keeping it very structured. Uh anyways, so there we go. Let's put up one more time, Jesse. Deep life map for those who are watching.

32:12 That's it. Here, I'll make it a little smaller. Boom. All right. Deep life map, vision, capability, values, how long you spend in each, how much you come back and forth to each depends on you. Your mileage might vary, but this is the way we'll be thinking about this going forward. >> So, your next book, like the thinking book, is is it going to be structure or is it more open-ended? the in the fence of thinking. >> Yeah. >> What do you think? I I mean I'm still in the stage now. >> There's so many times that people ask you questions and ask you questions. I don't know. What do I think? >> I would assume it's going to be structured. >> Yeah. >> But I don't know how it seems to be like well I guess a life is up. >> I think it's going to be practical and philosophical. [snorts] >> So I haven't quite figured that out yet. It'll probably be closer. So for those who don't know about my it's not a book

32:58 I've sold yet. I'm just saying my idea for the book I want to write next is on cognitive fitness. I want to call it indefensive thinking. Um, and basically expand in detail the general argument I made in that splashy New York Times piece from last winter. And uh, I want to make the case for cognitive fitness. I want to make the case for thinking. I mean, I have all these notes on this, but like what I mean by thinking, how it's at the core of of like everything we value as modern humans and that it's not something that we want to lose and it's something that we should we should um practice and get better at like we do with our health both institutionally and individually and then I guess get very practical about what that means. I mean, I really have Michael Pollen. I went back and reread in the fence of food, you know, a few months ago because that's my model

33:44 >> in the fence of food was like he's making his philosophical argument about how food culture has gone ary and why we should care about it. And then also got practical about how do we do that? How as an individual can we care more about food and that was his like uh eat less mostly plants. I forgot exactly what it was. Eat real food mostly plants not too much or something like that. >> Yeah. Not processed or something. >> Yeah. And it got really kind of practical as well. And so that's my model. Um, you know, I just want people I mean, I know my goal is I want people to think about thinking like they do about cognitive fitness like they do about physical fitness today. >> And as individuals and societies and governments like putting as much energy into preserving and improving cognitive fitness as we do physical fitness. I want people just to be really excited about their cognitive fitness and have a

34:29 lot of things in their life where they're trying to get more cognitively fit. But I haven't quite figured that out. I'm still like reading a bunch of books, which is always the fun stage. I'm reading a lot of books about thinking, >> like how the brain works. >> You've been telling the audience we've been showing them, >> keeping keeping people up to date. I have some outlines, too, but I'm not quite at the at the point yet where I'm still staying open. I haven't locked anything in yet. Um, yeah. So, I was think I was worried the deep life will seem like a oneoff, but I think it's okay. I mean, largely what I'm a computer scientist who writes about humans flourish human flourishing and technological world. So, most of my stuff is often having a foot in the technological world and then seeing how that impacts human flourishing. But really, this book is just on the human flourishing side. It's like, hey, figure out what you really your ideal life. That's very exciting. You're moving towards it. You're going to have so much

35:14 more autonomy over all this sort of techno stuff that's trying to pull you away from that. But it it will seem a little bit like a one-off. The the cover is awesome. I I think I'll be able to debut it in the next week or two. >> Oh, exciting. >> Yeah, it's really cool. I really I do like it a lot. Um and we the the subtitle we we fixed on was um a structured approach, >> the deep life. I thought you were going to say something like baseball something the deep life [laughter] baseball Disney quest for the perfect animatronic. Uh no it's the deep life a structured approach. So it's really emphasizing this is like a systematic computer scientist approach to the mechanics of transforming your life. >> Not hey what should be in a a life well-lived. One last thing. Did you uh unrelated, did you read the recent article about the 250th and the New

36:00 Yorker and had a lot of that Teddy Roosevelt >> um I haven't read it yet, but my uh one of my former editors, The New Yorker, was telling me the other day that he lives near the Oyster Bay, which we talked about recently, like, "Oh, I want to go visit the Teddy Roosevelt summer house up there." And I guess it's in >> Long Island maybe, or upstate New York. And then there was a big thing in like North Dakota too in the article. >> Yeah. When he was out in the Badlands, but it turns out this town, there's a town near where the the summer house is that has like a cool bookstore. And then I was like, "Oh, that'd be cool to do a bookstore event. I think it'd be fun to do one like up by Teddy Roosevelt's house. I think it fits in well." Um, no, but I haven't read that article yet. Yeah, he spent a lot of time out in the Badlands. >> Yeah, I felt like I was getting a lot of Teddy Roosevelt this week and last week.

36:47 >> I mean, not the most um responsible. I mean, he had this It's a different time. His wife and his mom died >> on the same day. >> Like on the same day, his wife giving birth to his daughter and because I was watching the Netflix thing on Teddy Roosevelt with my wife. Um so he's like, "I'm really sad about that." Right? So he's like, "I'm going to go out to the Badlands and just like live on a ranch and hunt or whatever." But he just left his daughter. So he was just like, "All right, uh my wife is dead, my mom is dead. I'm just going to go spend a year living and hunting." He just left his daughter with his relatives to raise. You know, that's the that's the only kind of asterric on that. He was like, you know, that's one thing he could do is like raise your daughter, but he was like, "No, I got to go hunt buffalo,

37:32 which is what I will do if my book does not sell the level I want. I'm going to move to South Dakota and hunt buffalo and wear bare skins or whatever he was doing out there." All right, that's enough of this uh deep dive nonsense. Um it's enough of talking about what uh I was interested in. And now I want to hear what you're interested in. As we always do on our Monday episodes, we like to open up our inbox and see what you have sent us. If you have a question for the show or something, a comment or something you want to share I think might be interesting, send it to podcast at calupport.com and maybe we will talk about on the air during this segment. All right. What's our uh first message we have today, Jesse? >> Our first message is from Vincent, who has too many interests and not enough time. >> Too many interest and not enough time.

38:17 All right, so let's see what Vincent said here. Vincent said, "I have been thinking seriously about your ideas on deep work and the deliberate construction of a working life. If you had to give one principle to a technically trained person with many legitimate interests who wants to become exceptionally capable over the next decade, what would it be?" All right. And I think Vincent like elaborated like a long list of things he was interested in. So, I mean, I like the go- getting attitude here. You know, I'm willing to do the work. I want to get better at things. I want to have career capital. There's so much stuff I could be good at. I want to be good as much as possible. Typically, my my advice here is to do less, do better. You can only really be focused on a very small number of things at a time that you really want to get good at. And that's okay. Just take a small number of things you get really good at can open up all sorts of

39:02 really interesting opportunities and give you a lot of meaning in your life. It's not necessarily better to be good at five things versus two. that that difference is minor and maybe it's even worse to be really good at five things because they're they're crowding each other out in a way that's frustrating. There is however a giant difference between being good at zero things versus one. So having mastery in your life versus not makes your life much better. Having more things that you have mastery on than less doesn't necessarily make your life um that much better. So I'd say that number one. Number two, you got to leverage the power of sequentiality. You're focusing on this for a while. You get good at it. Then you pick up another skill that takes another few years. In the short term, that seems interminable. But over the period of like a decade, you might look back and say, "Actually, yeah, there's, you know, this thing I do

39:49 professionally I'm really good at and I I know a lot about jazz music and I've become, you know, a pretty adept guitar player and I'm I'm I'm really into like vintage cars and I'm these things can add up different seasons of your life where you're having the joy of learning about something new. over time you look like one of these sort of Renaissance men, right? Like wow, you have all these things you do and know you didn't sit down with a list of five and like I'm going to work on all these concurrently to try to get to you one at a time. Sequentiality can also add up over time to a lot of impressive things. But I really don't I guess what I'm trying to get away from here is you should not be seriously pursuing lots of things be them personal or professional or both

40:35 concurrently because it is stressful. It slows down your progress and you can log jam and log jam is this effect like I talk about in slow productivity where you cannot just time doesn't scale or parallelize neatly when it comes to task right so it's not just a case of I have five skills each of them is going to take me a year if I worked on it by itself to master um so I could either do one after another in five years or work on all five for five years and end up you know being good at all five of them you can't necessarily rearrange time that way. When you work on too many things concurrently, you get log jams, which is where the overhead of these things uh adds up to the point where it's hard to actually make legitimate progress on any

41:21 of them and you slow down your overall pace, right? So like often the best way to learn something is to have it be one of the few things that you're really focusing on and then moving on later to a next thing to move on to the next thing is actually the total time to learn all those things will be less than if you try to do them all together because you want to avoid sort of log jamming effect. So Vincent, I I admire your uh attitude, but be patient. Do less, do those things really well. Let things take time. Add things slowly over time. I mean, professionally, I was I just did a um a podcast interview this weekend. Um well-known figure who I really admire. I guess I don't like to announce podcast things until they actually come out, but it'll be out soon. Um and we were talking >> it was not Rogan. It was someone who is um >> say a little bit more intellectually distinguished in some senses. I'll just

42:07 leave it at that. Uh, and civically distinguished. Um, but we were talking about this uh, in this interview. We're talking a little bit about me and I was like, yeah, I decided now 20 almost 25 years ago. I mean, I was like a sophomore in college. I like here's the things I'm going to get good at, like computer science and writing. I'm still working on that. Like those are the things I've continued to like continue to try to get better at and and and like that's been basically it. I've been doing that for over two decades now. And that's it's great. Like I've gotten pretty good at it. It's caused a lot of interesting things. And you have these little offshoots when you get better at things like this podcast. The podcast is coming directly out of my writing and academic work, right? These are the ideas I'm reflecting to. But also to be a writer for 20 years. Uh one

42:53 of the things you get really good at over time is talking about your books because I've been doing podcast professional, you know, radio and podcasts at a very regular clip since roughly like 2014 when this really started taking off. I'm like 12 years into that now. And so something like this podcast sort of emerges as a like natural slowly evolving uh side threat of this this you know main threat. So sometimes just doing a small number of things really well. It takes a really long time. It's very rewarding and it has its own little offshoots along the way that themselves can be like very impressive but weren't something that you set out from scratch to do. They were sort of natural outgrowths of your sort of core trunks, little branches off the core trunk of what you're trying to do better. I keep asking you this, but what do you think the prime years are for a writer? Like compared to like an athlete where it's only like >> uh you know it's there there are no

43:38 prime years basically. I mean the first 10 years are not because it takes a decade to become reasonable at writing. Um maybe for some people I guess if you live long enough there'll be some years at the end where you're sort of like losing your sharpness but otherwise it's like wine. I I think writers get better. Their thinking gets clearer. they um are more confident that it's a really it's an aggregate skill like through accretion you pick up your skill in writing just sort of gets better as you as you go on writing becomes easier to do and so that's why I like writing so you can have a very long prime like from 30 to 80 you can have like a 50-year prime >> where you're just you can just turn out um like stuff that's it doesn't lag as long as you can keep the energy high

44:25 we're going to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. But stay tuned because not only do we have more questions left to answer, but we'll be playing the game deep or crazy in the final segment, which we haven't done in a while. So, that should be fun. But first, let's talk about MasterClass. As you know, Jesse, uh we're always trying to level up our game here, both in terms of our video and audio quality. And let me tell you, um I get obsessed sometimes about the details of like, okay, how exactly do I set up like our camera zoom or white balance or something like this? But in reality, here's what I realized. Most of that was a distraction. What really mattered, what we had to focus on here was the story. How do you actually tell compelling stories that people want to hear? I learned about this from

45:12 masterclass. diving into their courses on directing and storytelling from legends like Martin Scorsese and weren't weren't Herzog taught me really important information about how you actually capture someone's attention and tell a real story. This is the type of thing that sets MasterClass apart. You're not just watching kind of random surface level internet tutorials or just sort of asking a chatbot what they think. You're learning directly from some of the world's best. Whether we're talking about the worlds of film or business or writing or creativity, they have over 200 classes across 13 categories, including one from yours truly, me talking about how to manage your time and beat distraction. Um, and with plans starting at just $10 a month build annually, it's incredibly

45:59 accessible. You can even use audio mode to listen during workouts or on commutes. And this is all backed up by a 30-day money back guarantee. So, give it a try. And if it's not for you, nothing is lost. So check out check it out and start learning today from the best at masterclass.comdeep. I also want to talk about our friends at notion. Um I don't know about you, but I don't know if I want to live in a future where every company is just some random dude orchestrating a fleet of 100 agents producing slop, right? AI can make businesses much better, but only if it's used correctly. This is why I like the vision that notion is pursuing. Notion is the AI workspace where your team's knowledge, projects, and agents all come together in one place. Teams using

46:45 Notion move faster, cut frictions and costs by consolidating tools, and stay aligned. And because everything lives together, Notion has the context it needs to answer questions instantly, automate busy work, and keep moving. It's AI designed to strengthen teamwork, not replace it. Now, with over 100 million users, Notion is already trusted by 98% of the Forbes Cloud 100 and 95% of the top 50 AI companies, including OpenAI, Cursor, Lovable, and more. You can learn more about how Notion can support your business at notion.com/cal. That's all lowercase letters. Notion.com/cal to try Notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Speaking of our show, let's get back to it. All right, what do we got next? Our

47:31 next question is from Devin who wanted to share an article. >> Devin said, "I'm a rabid Cal fan but wondered if he has seen this fascinating article. Best and keep it up. Look forward to the new book." That's sort of an ambiguous, Jesse. Does he mean I'm a Cal fan who has rabies or does he mean I just am a >> Oh, rabbid calan. >> Yeah. Trying to figure this out. I hope I hope you get that treated before it's too late. Or does it mean uh I like Cal so much that I want to bite people? [laughter] I guess rabid means like in this context a uh enthusiastic supporter of um okay so Devon sent along an article. Let's see. We have this one, right? All right. Let's load it up here. It's from Nature Human Behavior. I have

48:17 it here on the screen. The title is voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses in humans. Um, I hadn't seen it, but I did read it uh ahead of time. So, I'm going to try to skip forward here. There's a key paragraph that Okay, so I guess this paragraph is sort of the key to this. So, it says, "We first tested whether voluntarily directing attention towards bodily sensations influences the immediate inflammatory response. In experiment one, participants underwent histamine induced skin inflammation while maintaining gaze on the screen for the following 20 minutes. Attention was directed either internally towards

49:03 sensations at the test site or externally towards distracting video clips. All right, let's stop there for a second, Jesse, just so we understand the setup of this experiment. They were saying we are going to cause literal inflammation. they they prick their skin with stuff that causes it to um inflame, like they get big bumps, like a bruise. And then we're going to manipulate your attention for 20 minutes after you literally have an inflammation sort of immune response that we've induced somewhere on your arm. And if I understand this correctly, one group was being distracted, watch like interesting video clips or this or that. And another group was told to attune specifically towards what they were feeling in their arm. Like the inflammation, they're thinking about what is happening, paying attention to

49:48 the actual inflammation in their arm. All right. So, let's see what actually happened here. In line with our pre-registered hypothesis, internal attention, so so paying attention to what's happening on your arm produced a substantially smaller and more regulated inflammatory response than distraction. All right, that's interesting. So, what they're saying here, Jesse, is that you could actually control physical inflammation in your body by just paying attention. If I'm paying attention there, I can actually make it die down with no other physical intervention versus if I'm distracted elsewhere. Um, that's a cool finding. What's the broader idea there that might be important to what we talk about? I mean, I think this dovetales with cognitive fitness in the sense that it is

50:34 underlying the criticalness of attention, right? Attention is this incredibly powerful thing. Our brains are what defines us as a species. It's also our brains are at the core of a huge part of our economy right now uh because of intensive knowledge labor that requires brains to add value to information and being able to attend. So to take the mind's eye and your brain and turn it towards one topic towards another be it your body reflections about yourself a problem you're trying to solve or a situation that you're trying to get through is like one of the most powerful things that we as a species can do. And I think this just sort of underscores that that our mind and attention is so powerful that by paying attention to parts of our body, we can change like our immune responses. Just like our ability to reflect on ourselves and our lives and make sense

51:19 of things that are happening to us can really change our sense of self and moderate things like anxiety responses or stress about the future, what's happening or what's going on. So our attention is incredibly powerful tool just like you might say your cardiovascular fitness is really important because it has all these other impacts on parts of your life in the physical domain. And yet we don't think about it at all. We take it for granted. We don't train it and we poison it with all sorts of things that makes us bad at paying attention. This is clearly the case in the personal sphere where, you know, we have the cognitive equivalent of ultrarocessed food with algorithmically curated distraction apps. Sure, that makes a lot of money for a small number of investors, but it's the equivalent in our mind um if we were just eating Doritos several bags a

52:05 day and drinking slurpees, right? like it's terrible for our ability to actually pay attention. And then in work, it's even worse because there's a dollar and cents result. Like the better I can control my mind, the more literal value I can create for my organization if I'm in a knowledge work company. And yet almost everything we build out about knowledge work completely makes us difficult to pay attention, makes it much harder to pay attention, makes our mind weaker. Right? For decades, I've written books about this. It's email, it's Slack, it's this sort of constant overflow of meetings where with the the last thing we're prioritizing is the human brain and giving it the time and space to actually focus on something and create value. Now AI is coming along. You have all these managers that don't know an LLM from a reinforcement learning policy network

52:51 from a robot like I don't know. They just sort of see this all as vaguely AI and they're reading all these LinkedIn posts about people orchestrating their agents to orchestrate agents and getting in 19 seconds getting done what used to take them roughly six centuries, right? like just they're reading all this stuff and it's like we're an AI first company and like what are they doing is they're making this attention issue even worse because they're like let's let's take the thing that doesn't require attention the kind of the busyiness stuff and let's hypercharge it so you can spend all of your time this orchestrating AI things doing busy work no one ever comes in and says but your ability to pay attention without context shifts is what ultimately creates the value not your ability to automatically turn a a a phone transcript into a PowerPoint that could be summarized by someone else's bot and added to the calendar it's focusing on things where the values produce is knowledge work. So we don't think about attention at all. So again,

53:37 if we go to a physical analogy, it'd be like if I was trying to run the, you know, an Olympic team for my country and I I didn't care at all about nutrition or exercise and all the other I was like, "No, I really care about like our uniforms. I want to make sure that like we have like a really cool like coordinated way that we come in when when we uh show up on the opening ceremonies march and and I I you know care about our marketing materials and I was like oh but I I'm not even thinking at all about not only am I not thinking at all about exercise and nutrition but I have you doing things that are making you out of shape. I have you smoking cigarettes because I want the Palmau ad you know hey we should get more ad money. You should do cigarette ads. You all should be smokers now. Like I'm doing things that actively making you worth at the sport. That's what we're doing in business now by not caring at all about the power of attention and in

54:23 fact creating things that makes attention harder to actually apply. So I think that's what I take out of that be it's kind of a cool mind over body type of situation. Attention is powerful. It's one of the most powerful forces we have as the smartest species to ever live and we completely take it for granted. So that's why I come come away from >> they talk about it in bodybuilding too. >> What? >> Like really focusing on like >> Yeah. focusing on muscle curl like really like >> doing the curl >> mind body whatever right if you're actually like really thinking about the muscle fibers contracting you get >> like the whole time >> yeah you get a bigger response >> which is hard to do but >> yeah yeah well I mean if you talk to like >> that's what the study reminded me of >> talked to friend of the show Brad Stolberg for example who does amateur powerlifting you can't it's incred he'll

55:09 explain it's incredibly cognitively demanding you can't make because you're at the ex the limit of what you can lift you can't hit your PRs without full focus >> because you have to recruit every muscle fiber and you need that kind of mind over muscle control. Yeah. So attention is powerful and I don't know why we don't care about it. The sort of LinkedIn AI manager culture is so ridiculous. It's like everyone trying to feel like they're smart. All right, who else do we have here?

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